Nick C

Polperran Perfectly Prepared Plywood Point Panel Prop Prevents P!ss Poor Plywood Point Panel Propping?

Apparently in Thailand if there's a collision between a local and a tourist it's often automatically deemed to be the tourist's fault, on the basis that if they weren't there, the collision wouldn't have happened... On the subject of parking, there's one further up our road this evening - SUV, half on the pavement, facing against traffic, and on the opposite side of the road to all the other parked cars. Just about enough room to weave a normal sized car through, but no way an ambulance or fire appliance would fit...

Has anyone else noticed that the Kremlin seems to be running out of Putin lookalikes? They seem to be looking less and less like the original each time...

That certainly matches the LSWR practice that I'm more familiar with. Brighton practice seems a bit more varied when it comes to FPLs - Looking through the Pryer book on West Sussex lines I see 8 stand normally in, 5 normally out, and 7 don't say.

When eating a cream tea in the south west, it's important to have at least two scones - that way you can have jam then cream on one, and cream then jam on the other, and so offend both sides equally...

Even as a heritage volunteer that soon becomes second nature. As for the brightness of lamps, the signal in my avatar is lit by a modern LED, and even that's invisible in daylight...

The "thanks" on the last two posts is from Mrs C, who went to university in Katowice - she says those photos bring back a lot of memories.

Not black for point levers? I'd assumed that was pretty universal. Release levers were blue over brown later on... It does seem logical that colours would be standardised, though I guess not essential as signalmen from one company wouldn't generally operate a box from another?

As long as the next box knows what to expect, I don't see an problem with that - though I'm not sure how you'd keep a newspaper on a lamp bracket! They are - in bright sunlight the red lights on a 60s Diesel are pretty hard to see unless you're almost directly behind it. IMHO that's worse than no tail lamp at all - as it increases the risk of a wrong-side failure. Better to assume the line is blocked when it isn't, than to assume it's clear when it isn't...

My understanding is that distant levers changed from green to yellow around the same time that the arms changed from red to yellow - early 20s?

But fails to actually do anything to make that possible! On a different note, what idiot thought it a good idea to cone off the outside lane of a roundabout, halfway round? Especially a roundabout that's only just finished roadworks lasting nearly three years, and now has spiralling lanes and traffic lights...

This just cropped up in my YouTube feed - 1:33...

I've not tried the Railmatch, but that's why I suggested the Precision one, I've used it on several 4mm wagons and know that it looks right (at least to my eye).

There's a photo of a suitable Brighton prototype here: https://www.kentrail.org.uk/horsted_keynes.htm - looks like a wooden beam sat on a ledge of brick, with a couple of vertical lengths of rail bolted on (presumably to keep everything the correct height)

The posts I was quoting were referring to vans parked over the weekend/not on a job, i.e. tradespeople taking their work vehicle home - for many self-employed people (e.g. a plumber or electrician) home is often their only premises, so where else could they park? Adding extra expenses for someone who is already struggling to get by isn't going to help much, especially when things like insurance are going up at record rates. A bigger problem is people with huge SUVs when they only really need a hatchback, and households with multiple cars in areas that don't have space for them. I used to live in a Victorian terrace like those described by @cctransuk above - one neighbour had three cars, all on the road - even though they had room round the back where they could have made a driveway.

This page suggest Sharp Stewart: http://www.gwr.org.uk/nocamrys2.html

I'm not sure you need the slots for the rear legs of a bufferstop - I think they'd just use a beam bolted to the wall.

That makes things rather impossible for self-employed tradespeople...

That must depend on the industry, as I find it much easier to work through complex problems on a call, as everyone can have "eyes on" the problem instead of having to look over someone else's shoulder to see a screen. We tend to reserve office-day meetings for higher level discussions. Flexible working also makes things much easier when dealing with clients/suppliers in different timezones - I can easily dive onto an occasional call at 7pm from home which would be miserable from the office. Probably the same reasons that see companies spending millions on outsourcing their back office functions one year, only to then spend more millions bringing them all back in a few years later... According to this one it's finally starting to go the other way though: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/02/half-of-uk-firms-open-offices-outside-city-centres-study-claims - albeit we're not seeing much of it in Basingstoke yet, and the council seem madly keen on turning all the town centre offices into poor-quality dormitory flats - which of course only makes the problem worse as the M3 corridor has been running well over capacity for years. Or stop people driving their kids when they live under a mile away - except of course they'll tell you that they have to drive as it's too dangerous to walk, due to all the other parents driving...

Exactly my point - the media decided to conflate "Low traffic neighbourhoods" (the stick) with "15-minute city" (the carrot) - the original proposals for the latter never included the former, merely making sure that residential districts ought to have everything they need locally. I disagree - look at the huge push to get people back into central London. There's no way that's more economically efficient, London office space is way more expensive than elsewhere (A quick google finds this link suggesting that, per-desk, London is 4 times more expensive than Basingstoke), not to mention that staff need to be paid more to afford London living or commuting. A huge proportion of our traffic problems are caused by commuting and school runs, so anything that can reduce the number of cars used at these times has to be a good thing.

Which is of course what the concept of 15-minute cities was intended to alleviate, before getting hijacked by the hard-right... Plus as we've seen with the push-back against remote working post-Covid, there are too many influential people with a vested interest in centralising everything and selling more cars and hydrocarbon fuel...

Ours is mid-60s and has similar problems - the point I was making earlier, and is clearly shown up by @30801's last post, is that they're still doing it despite knowing modern car ownership patterns - in fact it was, for some time, general planning policy to deliberately restrict the number of parking spaces - it appears from our local council's documentation that this only changed in 2015.

Made worse by most modern housing estates deliberately being built without enough parking - there is one near my parents with the usual one or two spaces per house, despite being in a village with three buses a week - so every house has at least two cars...

I reckon a yellow one weathered like the above, to your excellent standards, would look fantastic. Complete with the traffic cone, obviously...

Have you seen @makeitminiature's videos on his interlocking - he explains it pretty well. Calculating the locking requirements isn't too complex as long as you don't have anything nasty like conditional locking etc. The first step is to write down a list of the actual locking requirements - known as a locking table: Lever | Released by | Locks Normal | Locks Both Ways | Releases | 1 | 2 | | | | 2 | | 3, 12, 5 | | 1 | 3 | | 2 | | | 4 | | | 3 | [8, 9]w/3R| ... Note that there's often less needed than you think - for example, in this case 2 doesn't need to lock any other signal levers as 8/9 are locked by 3 being normal, and 10/20 by 5 being normal - so all the conflicting moves are accounted for. I've over-complicated this example too - you could have 4 only locking 3 reverse (as there's no signalled moves from the platform to the down line), in which case you wouldn't need the conditional locking on 8/9. Once you've got that you can then think about the dog chart (the actual diagram of the physical locking bars, tappets and dogs).